BRUCE LIPTON: THE BIOLOGY OF BELIEF

Bruce H. Lipton, PhD, is an internationally recognized leader in bridging science and spirit. Stem cell biologist, bestselling author of 'The Biology of Belief' and recipient of the 2009 Goi Peace Award, he has been a guest speaker on hundreds of TV and radio shows, as well as keynote presenter for national and international conferences.

Dr. Lipton began his scientific career as a cell biologist. He received his Ph.D. Degree from the University of Virginia at Charlottesville before joining the Department of Anatomy at the University of Wisconsin’s School of Medicine in 1973. Dr. Lipton’s research on muscular dystrophy, studies employing cloned human stem cells, focused upon the molecular mechanisms controlling cell behavior. An experimental tissue transplantation technique developed by Dr. Lipton and colleague Dr. Ed Schultz and published in the journal Science was subsequently employed as a novel form of human genetic engineering.

In 1982, Dr. Lipton began examining the principles of quantum physics and how they might be integrated into his understanding of the cell’s information processing systems. He produced breakthrough studies on the cell membrane, which revealed that this outer layer of the cell was an organic homologue of a computer chip, the cell’s equivalent of a brain. His research at Stanford University’s School of Medicine, between 1987 and 1992, revealed that the environment, operating through the membrane, controlled the behavior and physiology of the cell, turning genes on and off. His discoveries, which ran counter to the established scientific view that life is controlled by the genes, presaged one of today’s most important fields of study, the science of epigenetics. Two major scientific publications derived from these studies defined the molecular pathways connecting the mind and body. Many subsequent papers by other researchers have since validated his concepts and ideas.

Dr. Lipton’s novel scientific approach transformed his personal life as well. His deepened understanding of cell biology highlighted the mechanisms by which the mind controls bodily functions, and implied the existence of an immortal spirit. He applied this science to his personal biology, and discovered that his physical well-being improved, and the quality and character of his daily life was greatly enhanced.

Dr. Lipton has taken his award-winning medical school lectures to the public and is currently a sought after keynote speaker and workshop presenter. He lectures to conventional and complementary medical professionals and lay audiences about leading-edge science and how it dovetails with mind-body medicine and spiritual principles. He has been heartened by anecdotal reports from hundreds of former audience members who have improved their spiritual, physical and mental wellbeing by applying the principles he discusses in his lectures. He is regarded as one of the leading voices of the new biology. Dr Lipton’s work summarizing his findings, entitled The Biology of Belief, Spontaneous Evolution, Our Positive Future and a Way to Get There From Here and his latest book The Honeymoon Effect. www.brucelipton.com

Interview by Evelyn Einhaeuser

Your research showed that our genes are not responsible for our beliefs, nor are they the cause for our diseases. Can you explain your research a little bit?

Inside our body are 50 trillion cells. Every day we lose hundreds of billions of our cells just from aging and damage, wear and tear. You have to replace them otherwise you would run out of cells and die. So the question is where do you get the new cells from? The answer is stem cells. Now what is a stem cell? A stem cell is an embryonic cell. It can become anything, bone, muscle, skin, brain, anything. The cell before you are born is called embryonic cell, the same cell after you are born is called stem cell.

Now here's my research: I would take one stem cell and put it in a petri dish by itself. And the cell divides itself every 10 hours. So first it is one cell, then two, four, eight, sixteen, etc. Until at the end of the week, I have 50,000 cells in the Petri dish. The important part is that all the cells came from the same parent, so therefore I have 50,000 genetically identical cells. That is called cloning. So I have all these embryonic cells in the petri dish and they live in the culture medium, which is the environment. When I grow cells in a tissue culture artificially, I construct the culture medium based on the blood. That means I will make it according to the composition of the blood from the animal that I get the cells from. So when I work with mouse cells for example, I try to make a culture medium that is the same composition as the blood of a mouse.

So I grew one cell in a petri dish. After a week I had 50,000 stem cells. They are all genetically the same. And then I split them into three different petri dishes and have genetically identical cells in each petri dish. But I change the chemicals in the culture medium in each of the dishes. So in each of the dishes is a slightly different chemistry than in the other one. What happens is that in one dish the cells form muscle. In a second dish the cells form bone and in the third dish the cells form fat cells. Now what controls the fate of the cells? The environment! They are all genetically the same. So if I change the chemistry of the culture medium, I change the fate of the cells.

People are made out of 50 trillion cells. So in a humourous way, a human being is not a plastic petri dish, but a human being is a skin covered petri dish. Inside your body you have 50 trillion cells in a culture medium. The culture medium is called blood. If I change the chemistry of the blood, it's the same as changing the chemistry of the culture medium in a plastic dish. It doesn’t make a difference for the cell if it's in a plastic or in a skin dish– the cell is controlled by the culture medium. In a plastic dish this is a synthetic culture medium and in the skin dish the blood is the culture medium.

So the chemistry of the blood controls the fate of the cells.

Now what controls the chemistry of the blood? The brain is the chemist. The brain releases hormones and growth factors and signal molecules into the body via the blood and those signals go through the body and affect the cells whereever they are in the body. So the brain is the catalyst. And what chemical should the brain put into the blood? The answer depends on what the mind is perceiving.

So imagine you are sitting with your eyes closed. And you open your eyes and you see your partner and you feel love. So once you opened up your eyes and recognized your partner, the brain releases hormones associated with love like dopamine which is pleasure, oxytocin which is bonding and usually also growth hormones. So when people are in love, the brain is releasing a cocktail of chemicals including growth hormones. And those chemicals are adding strong nutrients to the culture medium, because they cause the cells to grow very healthy. So when people are in love, they have so much health that they glow.

Now you are the same person and you sit there with your eyes closed, but this time when you open them you see something that scares you. So what does the brain release? You release stress hormones and inflammatory agents that affect the immune system.

So if I take the chemicals that come out of the brain in love and put them in a plastic petri dish, the cells grow beautifully. If I take the chemicals that come out of a brain or person in stress and put that in a culture medium, the cells stop growing.

What your mind perceives is always interpreted. And you release chemicals from the brain that match what you see. If you see something beautiful, you release chemicals that give you growth. But if you see something that is threatening, you release chemicals that give you protection.

And they are two opposite extremes in terms of what happens to the body. It can either support growth, which means you go towards all the signals that give you life and energy and you are open. When you're in an environment that is stressful or threatening, you go away from the signal. Growth is open, protection is closed. You cannot be open and closed at the same time, so we are either in growth mode or protection mode, but we can't be in both.

When we live in a world that supports us and our mind sees it as a healthy, wonderful, happy place, the chemistry from the brain goes into the blood and enhances growth. An environment that's threatening or scary releases chemicals of fear into the blood and that causes the system to shut down and go into protection.

The genes have nothing to do with this, because we haven’t even talked about the genes. The control over the cells depends really on what the mind is perceiving or the mind is interpreting. The genes control nothing. Now there is this huge belief system that genes “turn on” and genes “turn off” which is not true.

But on what does our perception depend? Im imagining two people. And one might interpret the same situation much more stressful than the other person?

Absolutely. No two people see the world in the same way. I give you a simple example. I am a kid and in the house next to me lives a kid with the same age. Now I go outside with my mother and there is a snake in the yard. And she's terrified of snakes. She is scared and she screams. And I as a child know that my mother screaming means that whatever she just saw is not good. So what did I learn from my mother? That a snake is dangerous.

And then the snake goes from my yard into the yard of my neighbor. But the mother of my neighbor is a zoologist or biologist and she sees the snake and she says "oh what a wonderful garden snake" and picks up the snake and handles it and her son which is my age sees the mother handle the snake and there is no fear. So that child, when it sees a snake, has a different response than when I see a snake. So when we both see a snake I get excited and scared, whereas when he sees a snake he is interested and enthusiastic. We both see the same snake but have totally different behaviors.

How come? The way we learn about life is by giving everything a value, whether it is good, it is bad, it is safe, it is scary. So if we ever see that thing again, we already have a value and this value is based on our first experiences.

In one of your talks you explained that even diseases like cancer depend on our perception and beliefs. Can you explain why one person might get cancer and another doesn’t, even though both persons carry that so called "cancer gene"?

The first thing we have to do is to correct an error, namely the belief that people's genes control things, that they turn on and off. A gene is a blueprint just like in an architect's office. When an architect is building a house he has a blueprint, a pattern. A gene is a blueprint to make a body part. It is exactly like a blueprint. It is not on, it is not off, it doesn’t control anything. You need a contractor to do the design with this blueprint. That's the mind.

If the mind says it's scary then you activate genes for protection. If the mind says it is safe you activate genes for growth and happiness. So basically the genes don’t control anything, it's how you see the world.

Now let's get to the idea of a cancer gene. When you look at all the cancer patients you find that most of them have a gene that is more active than in other people, so you call it a cancer gene, like the breast cancer gene brca1 for example. And how many of the women who have cancer actually have that gene? The answer is 50 percent.

So having the gene doesn't give you cancer. Of 100 percent of people with the gene only 50 percent get the cancer. So you can't say the gene caused the cancer. The gene might facilitate it, but it is not the cause. Now what's the cause? The answer is stress and anger and not living in harmony. And that is a feedback from the negative chemistry of the mind and that will make the cancer.

Angelina Jolie had a double mastectomy because she was afraid of cancer. She thought the gene causes the cancer. But it is not the gene, it is the behavior that causes the cancer.

But if it is the behavior, and she has a bad program, then she will express that cancer. So the whole idea is that the belief has to change. The genes make the building blocks of the cells. Now what you are going to build depends on what your mind has in it. So what if you are healthy but you build something unhealthy? Well what if, when you were growing up, your parents told you "oh you are sick, you are not healthy, there is something wrong with you, it is in the family". The belief of that will make the illness, not the genes.

Researchers looked at what happens to children who were adopted into a family where there is cancer running in the family for generations. The adopted child develops cancer with the same probability as the actual kids of the family. The adopted child came from totally different genetics. So the cancer running in the family wasn’t due to the genes, it was due to learning behavior that wasn’t in harmony with life. Learning behavior where you can't release anger for example. And as a result, when you can't release the anger, the chemistry from the brain that is caught up in anger and can't let it go is negative. That makes the cancer, not the gene.

I once watched a documentary on happiness and there was a professor from Hongkong that presented a “Happiness gene” and he showed that the length of the gene determines whether we end up being happy in our life or not. What do you think of that?

I laugh at that! This is a joke! Really what it is about is how you respond to the stimuli in your life. And that is learned. It is not a gene. Unfortunately, the story almost everybody has been told in school is that genes turn on and off. Genes control. And in science this is called genetic control or control by genes.

But the new model in science is called epigenetic control. Epigenetics is control above the genes.

The above means that the mind and the environment control the genes. So if you have a positive belief about something, you send information that supports the reality about that belief. And with a negative belief you can manifest a negative thing. I'll give you a simple example in the conventional world.

There is something called the placebo effect. The placebo effect is that I give you a pill and I tell you that this is going to heal you. You take the pill and you get better. Now later I tell you it was just a sugar pill. So what really healed you was not the pill, it was the belief that healed you. Medicine now recognizes that one-third to two-thirds, which is from 33 to 66 percent of all medical healing is due to the result of the placebo effect. The patient believes that whatever the doctor is doing for them is going to heal them and that’s why they got better. Not because of anything the doctor did, but because of the belief in the doctor.

Let's turn this around, because in the placebo effect we always talk about the healing effect of positive thinking. The question is what about negative thinking? Negative thinking is equally powerful! But it works in the opposite direction. Positive thinking can heal you from an illness, negative thinking can actually make you sick and can kill you. So thoughts, positive or negative, are shaping your life. The positive ones bring you health and harmony, the negative ones bring you stress, disease and death.

So the power of thought is the control of epigenetics.

The term denotes signals above the genes. So what are the signals above the genes? Well, the signals of the environment! So the signals from the environment adjust the cell to live in that environment. If you have positive thoughts, you have chemistry that enhances growth, if you have negative thoughts, you have chemistry that can shut down your immune system and your growth and can cause cancer.

This is important, because the belief that most people have is that genes control their life. This makes people a victim. They think "oh I didn’t pick the genes, but they control me". So people feel they have no power. And it turns out that this is totally false!

It is not the genes, it is the environment that controls the genes. So you are not a victim, you are a master, because you are the one that can change the environment and you are the one that can change the belief. So that is different, because the common medical story makes you a victim. The new epigenetics story makes you a master, because it says you can change everything. Only 1 percent of illness is actually really related to genes. 99 percent comes from lifestyle. And that becomes very critical because we kept blaming all of our health issues on a body that breaks down when in fact the health issues are not the body's fault. They are the mind’s fault.

So this is why it's necessary for people to understand epigenetics and the moment you change your mind you change your genetics.

There is a response study in which they were looking at genes associated with inflammation. And they found that eight hours of meditation can change two of the fundamental genes that control inflammation. Eight hours of meditation can change gene activity!

Then there is a wonderful study by Dean Ornish, who is a doctor in San Francisco. He took prostate cancer patients and split them into two groups. One group got the conventional medical treatment with drugs. In the second group all he did was change their diet, teach them how to meditate and taught them some stress reduction techniques. So they read the genes of both groups before the experiment and 90 days later they read the genes again. And in the group that changed the diet and learned meditation and stress reduction, 500 genes changed their function from that lifestyle.

And most of the genes were the ones creating that cancer. So basically epigenetics says you have these genes, but the genes don’t have a decision in how and why you read them, you have a decision in that. Epigenetics doesn’t change the genetic code, but environmental signals can change the reading of the code. So I can be born with a mutant gene and I could either express that mutation or not.

But in the right environment, epigenetics can correct the gene. You don’t change the gene, you just change the way it is read. Only one percent of us come with perfect genes. Most of us come with genes that can cause disease and ruin our lives.

99 percent of illness on this planet is from people not living in harmony, creating secretions into the blood that can even cause normal cells to become cancer cells. And so the largest amount of cancer is not because of bad genes. The largest amount of cancer is because healthy cells, which are read or interpreted from a negative environment, turn into cancer cells. So we are the ones controlling the reading of the gene by how we read the world.

And so you have to recognize your beliefs and your environment. Those are the elements that shape your genes.

That means that people have to take responsibility. It is always easier for all of us to blame something else, to say: "Oh my ancestry or my cells or my genes or in any way someone else is responsible for my situation!"

That’s because we have been programmed by the medical people to think if something is not right it is not you! As if you were a machine. And they are the ones that fix the machine. And the pharmaceutical companies say, "hey your machine is not working right, I sell you a chemical that can fix that." And usually that chemical is killing more people than it is saving, because people think these chemicals are healing agents, but usually they upset the balance of life and the body. The problem is not that the body is broken, but that the mind is thinking negative thoughts! Putting a chemical to fix the body while the mind is the problem doesn’t help the problem at all, because the problem doesn’t start in the body, it starts in the mind.

Many of the indigenous healers say that negative experiences are not just stored in the brain, but that they are stored in every cell in our body and that negative experiences can be passed on through the generations.

This is supported by epigenetics. For example there is a research done with a mouse. And the mouse got to smell cherry blossoms. It is a sweet smell, but once they put the smell in, they shocked the mouse. So every time it would smell this sweet smell, it would get a shock. At some point the mouse got afraid, it knew that as soon as the smell came the shock would be coming. They mated the mouse and the offspring of that mouse, even if that mouse had never smelled cherry blossom, had a fear response to it.

So that was passed on to the next generation. But what I really want to stress is that it might be programmed in there, but it's not a permanent thing at all because epigenetics changes with the environment and with the perception.

If people say "oh it is programmed in my genes and I have no control over it because I got that program and I am a victim", I have to say, "I don't care what you got, you can change everything because that's what epigenetics is all about".

You don't have to stick with the old program, you change your life and you can change your genes. As I said, even in eight hours of meditation your genes change. So if you start letting people know they can change their genes and that they can be powerful, then there's an opportunity to make health on the planet.

If you tell them they are victims and have actually no power, then you take away the health of the planet because somebody is going to make a lot of money out of keeping people victims. Pharmaceutical companies get in the way of healthy nutrition and of anything where people can empower themselves. And they keep the public away from becoming self-empowered, because as long as the public feels like victims, they are going to be customers. But if the public knows they can change their beliefs and their patterns and their genes, there is no more money for the pharmaceutical companies.

When we talk about negative thoughts we also know that much of negative patterning is anchored in the subconscious mind. So I have several questions regarding that. How do we know what subconscious programs are actually driving us and how do I change patterns in the subconscious?

This is correct. There are two minds. There is the conscious mind, the creative mind, connected to your spirit and your source.

The subconscious mind is a habit mind, it has a program which it plays over and over and over again. The creative, conscious mind is connected to your wishes and desires. You can create a vision of what you want. Now if I ask you what you are doing next thursday you will have to think about it for a minute. So your conscious mind goes into your head.

In that moment the subconscious mind takes over whatever you are doing. You know how to walk? Yes, your subconscious mind knows how to walk. You know how to drive a car? Yes, if you drive a car long enough, you don’t have to think about it, the subconscious knows how to drive a car. And let's say you are walking down the street and you have a thought, then your conscious mind goes into your head. You don’t stop walking, you keep walking, your subconscious mind keeps you walking. The subconscious mind is 1 million times more powerful than the conscious mind anyway.

Science has found that 95 percent of the day the conscious mind is thinking. When it's thinking it's not paying attention. If it stops paying attention, behavior doesn't stop. It just defaults to the programs of the subconscious mind. So 95 percent is left to the programs of the subconscious mind. Now where do the programs of the subconscious mind come from? Where do the first beliefs that come into the system come from?

In the first seven years of your life the brain is designed to be in a state called beta (EEG, electroencephalogram activity). Now beta is imagination. And if you observe kids between the age of two and seven, they mix the real world and the imaginary world all the time. They are in that imaginary mind state.

So it is said that in the first seven years your conscious mind is not working at a predominant activity, but instead you could say that you are more in a state of hypnosis.

Whatever you see or hear, whatever you are watching is bypassing consciousness and becoming a program in the subconscious. And this is important because it dictates what are the rules for becoming a member of a family or a member of a community. These are all rules and roles that you pick up, for example what is the role of the woman in the community, what jobs do people have, and all these things.

The first seven years the child observes the mother and father and the sisters and brothers and community around. And like a video camera the brain is recording other people's behaviors. A child learns behavior by watching other people's behavior. So the fundamental behaviors in your subconscious mind didn't come from you, they came from watching other people.

Now here's where the problem comes from. Your life and what you want, your wishes and desires and what you want to make out-of-life, that's the conscious mind in your head. That is creating that vision and has that intention. But the conscious mind is thinking 95 percent of the time. So by definition, you're only going towards your wishes and desires about 5 percent of the day. 95 percent of your behavior is actually coming from the subconscious mind! And that’s not even your behavior! You got it from other people!

And usually their beliefs don’t really match with what you want! So you will live the program that you received because your conscious mind is busy thinking all the time. So basically it says that 95 percent of the your behavior as an adult is coming from the programs of the subconscious. In my lecture I always tell a story that people have experienced:

Let's say you are close to a friend and you know their behavior very well and you happen to know your friend's parents as well. Then one day you see that your friend has the same behavior as their parent. So you say something like: “You know Bill, you are just like your dad.” And then you back away from Bill (laughs), because Bill becomes really angry and says: “How can you say that? How can you say I am like my dad?"

Most people laugh at that story because they are familiar with such an example. This is really profound, because everyone can see that Bill is behaving like his dad except Bill. And why is that? The first seven years of his life he observed his father and downloaded his father's behavior as a natural behavior.

But why does he play it? Well, he plays it because his conscious mind is busy thinking. Then why doesn’t he see it? Because he is not paying attention. So he doesn't see that his own behavior is like his dad’s, because he only plays it when he is not paying attention.

And we are all Bill! 95 percent of our life is coming from this subconscious programming and we don’t see it. Every now and then we do see it. Every now and then we realize that shocking thing, "oh my god I was just like my mom or dad!"

And as a result of that, 95 percent of your life is run by programs that have nothing to do with your wishes and desires and that is why it is very hard to get to your goal. Because these are about the intentions of the conscious mind and you are only operating them for 5 percent of our life. So that’s why it's difficult for people to get to their wishes and desires.

So working on our subconscious is the only way?

No. You can also use mindfulness. Now mindfulness means what? Don’t let your mind think so much, because if it is not thinking, you keep it in the present moment.

But the moment you start thinking you take your mind out of the present moment and then you start playing the program.

Science has revealed that when we fall in love it is one time where we become mindful without even knowing. So when you first fall in love you don’t play those bad programs from the subconscious, because you are present. And also both partners are operating from the conscious mind, fulfilling their wishes, so they are in a state of honeymoon, and they are happy. That’s why the moment you fall in love you don’t remember how bad your life was, it turns into heaven on earth. And you say: “I don't know how that happened.” Because it is the one time in your life you stopped playing these programs.

And psychologists say that 70 percent or more of these subconscious programs are disempowering, limiting and self-sabotaging. So the moment you stop playing those programs, life gets better. That’s why the honeymoon is so beautiful, because it is the one time where you stay mindful and you don’t get to play your own programs. But the honeymoon ends when the mind gets busy and the individuals in that relationship start thinking. And those negative programs that show up later take away the juiciness and the love and the heaven on earth, because 70 percent of those programs are negative.

But apart from mindfulness and operating more in the present moment, is there also a way to change subconscious patterns? Especially for people that feel that they get sucked into their negative patterns again and again?

Yes, you can reprogram the subconscious mind. All of us got programmed when we were very young. And the programs even started before we were born. We were programmed already in the uterus. So the program occurred before you were born and therefore you can't tell me what all the programs are that you have. You weren’t even conscious at that point.

So then I say how will I know what the programs are? You don't need to go to a psychiatrist to figure it out. The reason why it's simple, is that 95 percent of your life comes from the subconscious program. So by definition your life is a printout of your subconscious programs.

So the things that you like and that come easily to you in your life are there because you have a program that allows them to be there. In contrast anything that you have to work hard at, put a lot of effort into or anything you have to struggle for to make it happen, is a result of your programs not supporting that.

So if you're trying to find a relationship, or you can never get into a relationship and you're thinking it's not in my fate to be in a relationship, then this is not true. It is because whatever programs your mother and father and family had about relationships is not supportive.

And the second reason is that you play these programs 95 percent of the time and you don't see them, so that means at least 95 percent of the time you were sabotaging yourself and you don’t see it. And therefore you never understood why your relationships were not working.

So if people want to know what their programs are, I say what in your life comes easily to you is there because you have programs to support that. Anything that you struggle to get to, that is because you have programs that don’t support that.

And that's how you know what programs you want to change. So you ask where are the troubles in my life? If they exist in relationship for example you know you have to change your beliefs about relationship. And then you can work on yourself. So first it is about recognizing that the patterns come from programming. And that you can change them.

Now, there is always that belief that you can talk to your subconscious mind. And people try that and then they find themselves playing their programs again. And they get mad at themselves. And they get frustrated, because they think 'I keep talking to myself and it is not changing'.

You have to remember you are like an entity in the conscious mind. But the subconscious mind is just like a machine, it records, pushes a button, plays back. So if you are trying to talk to the subconscious as if there was somebody in there, it's frustrating because there is nobody in there to listen.

That’s not how the subconscious changes and that's why most people have a lot of problems and get mad at themselves when it doesn't change. Well, that is simply not how it learns.

So the two minds learn differently. The conscious mind is called creative and can learn by reading a self-help book or going to a lecture, watching a video, or reading an article. It is creative, it goes, "ah, I have an idea, now I change my mind."

The subconscious mind is a habit mind. And the most important thing about a habit mind is that you don’t want it to change very quickly, because otherwise habits fall apart. So it is resistant to change. That is the first thing we have to realize. It is not as easy to change like the creative mind. So how do I change my subconscious mind? How does it learn? Number one: The first seven years the mind is operating in a low vibrational frequency like hypnosis. So that is one way of changing the program. Number two: After you are seven you form habits by repeating something over and over and over again. Practicing, repeating, practicing.

An example: If you read a self-help book the conscious mind understood it, but the subconscious mind learned nothing from it, because you only read it once and this is not how it learns. If you repeat the message of the book over and over and over again and behave that way, then the subconscious mind will learn a new behaviour.

So it is about habituation, where you make a practice out of something, every day repeat it over and over again. So these are the two main ways, hypnosis, and habituation.

Then there is a third way now which is new and which is called energy psychology. And it activates the brain to be in a state of superlearning. If you engage superlearning, you can rewrite subconscious programs in about 10 minutes. Something you have had your whole life can be rewritten in 10 minutes! Now there are a bunch of different techniques, but they function all in about the same manner. It pushes the record button of the subconscious mind so you can download new data very, very fast. On my website www.brucelipton.com under resources, there is a list of about 20 different energy psychology processes all of which are effective and can help rewrite subconscious beliefs in a short period of time.

Do I chose whichever speaks to me from these 20?

Basically yes, you chose the one you feel most in harmony with. I personally was fortunate enough to meet Rob Williams, one of the people who created Psych-K. And that changed my whole life! These balances take only 10 minutes and you can rewrite a belief that you have had your whole life! They are very important, especially at this time, in this world, when all these crisis are happening. They are required to make necessary changes now.

If I rewrite my subconscious program, is it really rewritten like back in the old days with the old cassette tapes and a tape recorder, where what you had taped before would be totally gone?

Absolutely. And a new pattern does not disappear again. A negative program should be overwritten by a more positive program. You know there is a wonderful book called “Dying to be me” by Anita Moorjani (see Synergies interview with Anita here). She is from Indian descent, she was raised in Hongkong, she ends up getting cancer, her body functions are shutting down, she's had the cancer showing through her skin and she goes into a coma and the doctor says that this is the end of her life.

And she had an out of body near death experience. When she was out of her body she saw the stresses of her life were responsible for the cancer that she got. She had difficulties with her Indian upbringing and living in Hongkong with a completely different culture. And when she had that out of body experience she could decide whether to return to her body or not.

So when she returned she had that complete understanding of what had caused the cancer. So interesting enough she came out of the coma and within two weeks 70 percent of the cancer completely disappeared. In five weeks all of the cancer disappeared. And it all disappeared why? Because she came back with an understanding what the cancer was, that it was stress and conflict in the program. I always like to mention her because I call her the poster child of the biology of belief.

You say that the new biology unites conventional medicine, complementary medicine as well as spirituality and healing. Can you say a few words about that?

I was not a spiritual person as a scientist. I got into science to go the opposite way from spirituality. So I thought we were born and then we die and become chemicals.

And then I got into understanding how the cells worked and understood that the skin of the cell controls the cell more than the genes. I also understood a very important fact: No two people are biologically the same, meaning you can't take cells from yourself and put them in another body because anybody receiving those cells will reject it as "not-self". And you can't put somebody else's organ into your body because your system will say "not self". So there has got to be some identity of self on your cell, because your immune system will read cells from another person and identify them as not your cells.

So on the surface of our cells are little nano antennas which are protein antennas and they are called self receptors, not all of them are called like that but a bunch of them. When you want to transplant one organ from one person to another, you have to match up as many of the self receptors between the donor and recipient as possible, so you get a lesser possibility of rejection.

But if they are very separate from each other, the immune system will react aggressively to remove it so you just can't put anybody's heart or kidney into anybody else.

What's the point? If I take these protein antennas at the surface of the cell off, I lose my identity. If I take these antennas off the surface I can transplant those cells into any human and they never be rejected, because they don’t have an identity.

If I take the surface receptors off which are connected to my identity and I take my partners identity off from her cells, and put them on my cells, just the receptors, then I can't put my own cell back into my body again because my immune system will say not self. So the ownership of the cell can be transferred by exchanging receptors.

Now the receptors are facing the outside environment. They are receiving signals from outside the cell. That makes us different from each other. The antennas are receiving a broadcast. So your identity is like a television broadcast and it is being picked up by your cells which are like miniature televisions. And there's antennas that match your cell to your broadcast. A cell therefore is like a television. The 50 trillion cells in my body have antennas that tune into my station. So my body is like a television set. My body is playing the Bruce show right now. And just like on television when the picture breaks we say the television is dead. But the question is whether the broadcast is actually not there? And the answer is yes, it is there!

You just get another TV and you tune it into the right station and the broadcast is on again. My point about the self receptors and their identity and the environmental signals that get picked up by those self receptors is that environmental signals represent us and as long as we are alive we have those antennas and we engage with our show and our biology.

But if the body dies the environmental signal, the spirit, is still there. But if a future embryo shows up and has the same set of receptors on it that I have on my cells right now, then that future embryo is going to be me.

But I didn’t say whether it was male or female, that is just the television set. I didn’t say from which culture it is. So I come back into another TV but it could be a female TV. But I am still me!

So the fact of self receptors and that they pick up environmental signals that give an identity immediately led me from non-spiritual to fully spiritual recognizing each one of us is connected to an environmental signal that is unique for each one of us and no two people have the same signal. That the signal is immortal and that it is always in the environment. It’s the bodies that come and go. So the reincarnation belief is a functional part of this system. If a future embryo shows up with the same receptors, you will be back again, but in a different body.

What is your outlook for the future? Do you want to say something in the end?

Right now the world is going through a crisis. There are so many crisis, economic crisis, fuel crisis, healthcare crisis, agriculture crisis, etc. But they are all part of one crisis. And that is that the way human beings are living on this planet right now is destroying the planet. And in destroying the planet we are destroying us as well. We are in the process of going extinct.

And that's because we dont understand the harmonay of nature and how we ourselves as people can live in harmony. And this disharmony is creating an illness of the planet and an illness of civilization. So science is recognizing we are indeed going extinct. And the significance is that crisis causes us to change, crisis precipitates evolution. We are facing so many crisis that we can't continue living this way anymore.

So we have to change the way we are living. That is what the message is. And this crisis, this evolution looks very scary to a lot of people. The economy is bad, there is lots of hostility going on, and it looks very scary. But it is important to recognize that it needs the systems to be falling apart. And rather than being afraid i want people really to understand that. If the system is not falling apart, we would continue as we are doing right now. At least it is coming apart so we can build a better civilization.

Better beliefs, the belief of spirituality, the belief of personal empowerment, these are fundamental parts of the evolution that we all need to learn because we need our power back. And when people change their beliefs and habits, the planet can heal. Just like the cancer patient.

Exploring the paradigm of health.....And multidimensional wellbeing.... What is health from a holistic dimension and how can we support it? What is the secret to a healthy lifestyle? How can we address the different layers of our existence to achieve a feeling of wholesomeness and wellbeing?